Archive
for
July 2nd, 2010

You've heard the story of the Pied Piper, who lured away all the children of Hamelin because the town wouldn't pay him for getting rid of the rats. There's a real story behind the legend, and the town of Hamelin, Germany...

Would you recognize that someone is drowning if you saw them? Real-life drowning looks nothing like the way Hollywood depicts drowning: the yelling, the arm-waving, the violent panic.
The Instinctive Drowning Respon...

Photo: Pasi AaltoFor the Small Spaces exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Rintala Eggertsson converted the small space inside a stairwell into a towering bookshelf, and stocked it with 6,000 books!Jesu...

If P.T. Barnum were alive today, he'd totally promote his bicentennial birthday on July 5 by enticing suckers born every minute to see a 200 year-old-man.Marc Hartzman of AOL Weird News has a nifty article about one of h...

(Vimeo Link)
This 4 foot papercraft spawn of the Gundam anime franchise is awesome.
Standing at 4-feet tall, it may be smaller than most we have seen, but certainly the most impressive – this Freedom Gunda...

Ever wonder what exploring your innards through a colonoscopy would look like? There's an app for that! Vishal Srivastava's software company Subversus Interactive is coming out with a new game called Gyromaniac to help m...

This is a recently-declassified US government photo of a hydrogen bomb detonating in space. The test, called Starfish Prime, set off the nuke 250 miles above the Earth's surface. NPR explains that the US did so see...

I'm sure a lot of you like the art of M.C. Escher and
playing with LEGO, but Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu really managed to
combine the two into an amazing example of geek art*. Take a look at their...

A poll of 238 presidential experts at the Siena Research Institute has ranked the USA's presidents. This is the fifth time they have published such a list; the last one was in 2002. For the first time, Franklin Delano Ro...

It's time once again to cast your vote for America's Best Restroom! Will it be the toilets at Bryant Park in New York City, the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, or maybe the Santa Monica Pier in California? T...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the film Airplane! Surely, we can't let that go by without some kind of celebration, like, hmm, ...a quiz. How well do you know the jokes in the classic 1980...

London-based design firm Kiwi & Pom made the "Disco Chair." It has 200 meters of electroluminescent wire in different colors that can be flashed on and off. You can view more pictures at the link.
http://www.kiw...

A man wearing a fake horse's head -- or, alternatively, a man who has the head of a horse -- was spotted on Google Street View's presentation of Aberdeen, UK. This mysterious creature has reappeared on a different image...

It has always been my habit to give an idea – any idea – a fighting chance to percolate in my mind for a while, letting it have full reign to explore its own possibilities. The flip side of this liberal and...

The ScienceBlogs network had "Zombie Day" on Thursday. Just about all of the scientists who blog there posted at least one article about zombies, most of them somehow pertaining to their normal field of expertise. So...

Why do some people murder? Is it in their blood? Maybe so, according to scientific studies that suggest that there is a genetic basis for violent behaviors:They've tested some 30 criminal defendants, most of whom wer...

In this era of global economic downturn, two countries, Germany and China, aren't doing too shabbily. Now they can't be further apart: Germany is a stable democracy with a mature economy and China is an authoritarian gov...

Alessandro Loschiavo Design created this column of shelves called "Levita" made to look like fluttering papers: The shaped rod frame supports a series of hammered sheet metal planes,whose distance one from...